


Old Wood Bones

by Moonlark



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Gen, Sentient Ice Rink, i'm not really sure what to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 10:14:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3646476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moonlark/pseuds/Moonlark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was young, once.</p>
<p>(Now she is old and her rafters creak in the winter wind, but she knows she was young once.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Wood Bones

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, Everyone! Sorry I've been away for so long, it's been a hard year for my family. I promise I haven't forgotten about my other works, I just needed a long break. In fact, I'm working on the next chapter of River of No Return right now. 
> 
> As for this little story, I'm not really sure how to describe it or anything. I've always liked the idea of sentient buildings or objects that can't speak and interfere with human life. Maybe it seems a little weird, but please give it a chance.

She was young, once.

 

(Now she is old and her rafters creak in the winter wind, but she knows she was young once.)

 

She remembers well the original fleeting moments of consciousness, the feeling of awakening, and those first few years when her paint was new and her walls were clean and her floors were spotless and she reveled in the feel of skate blades across her ice. As the circles of seasons spun slowly by, and circles formed and melted and vanished into the smooth ice within her, she watched and waited and was content.

 

Her sisters bragged about the goals scored within them—the speed records broken—the cheering crowds and screaming commentators. She listened, and she nodded along, but she knew she preferred the beauty, elegance, and grace of the jumps that she witness, that she loved, that she owned.

 

But none of those skaters who she watched come and go and grow in front of her—none of them header when her ice whispered to them. None acknowledged when her boards sang them encouragement, and the years went by and her paint flaked and her metal rusted and her concrete developed minute cracks and gum collected on the underside of her seats and she aged with the turns of the seasons—and as she aged, she grew lonely.

 

And then he came.

 

The boy with the beaming smile walked into her one day, brimming with joy and vitality, and she couldn’t help but take note and send a wave of welcome his way. She watched with pride as he improved, as his hair grew and his skills grew with it, and she glowed with happiness every time he left the ice with a pat to her boards and a quiet thank you.

 

No one else noticed, of course, but she knew that he saw her true.

 

And then, one day, he didn’t come. It had happened before, that he  went away for a few days, and when he came back, he brought tales of glorious competitions—but he had always told her first. He wasn’t the kind of boy to just pick up and leave. She was certain of this, and the next few days seemed like an eon, a fearful eternity. 

 

When he returned, she couldn’t help the relief that washed through her. He came in with his head held high and both sadness and joy in his heart. He sat down on the bench next to her boards and told her that he was leaving. 

 

“I’m moving to Colorado,” he said. 

 

Part of her was upset, did not want to see him leave. But part of her—a larger part—was proud, proud that he’d gotten good enough to need to leave. That was how it was with human children. They grew, they captured hearts, and then they left home to strike out on their own. They were expected to leave and start over once they had grown enough that they could fend for themselves. Independence was valued, and leaving was a rite of passage.

 

So, as he left, she sent out a parting wave of comfort and acceptance, to show him that she understood, and that she did not blame him.

 

(That had been years ago, and in the fall. Now it is winter and the weight of the snow makes her poor roof groan.)

 

In the days (and weeks and months, she can admit now) that followed her boy’s departure, she found herself as lonely as ever. The empty, hollow feeling that had eaten at her before the boy’s arrival returned, and the ache was ten times worse for all that she had known his friendship. The jumps and spins that growing children practiced within her no longer gave her joy, no longer brought quiet contentment. Her sisters struggled to cheer her up with stories of great games and races, but she only sank deeper into the blank, depressive boredom that dominated her days.

 

She could no  longer bear to watch the skaters on her ice spin swirling patterns. She did not have the energy to send welcome to the new children that stumbled, unsteady and wary, through her doors. The cold winds that blew with each passing winter echoed inside her, lonesome and nostalgic, and her rust stains grew and her cracks widened as she slipped into her own coma-like hibernation.

 

But humans are humans, and as such, they would not—could not—let her rest. They had built her with their growling machinery and their persistent sense of pride and purpose, and they were not ready to let her crumble. They came in and performed open heart surgery with paint bandages and girder stitches and a system of concrete life support.

 

Now, her roof is sagging and the rot in her rafters is too far along to be cured. Water damage stains her ceilings, and her ice no longer stays as cold as it used to be. Even the humans have given up on her, and as soon as the snow melts, they will be moving in with bulldozers and backhoes and wrecking balls to make and clear the rubble. She doesn’t mind, though. It is her fate, and she will meet it well. She has no regrets.

 

(Regrets are human. She cannot afford to have regrets.)

 

Spring comes, slowly, and she squares her stones as the demolition date nears. The cranes edge up against her flanks and the men in orange jackets stand before her, surveying her and trying to decide where her death should begin. She ignores them, looking out to the small park across the street—and then she finds herself wishing that she could have just a little more time, because there in the park sits her boy. 

 

But there is no more time, as charges are being placed and a fuse lit—and she understands, she does, that he has come to mourn, as all good humans do. She knows this, and so she sends one last wave of warmth his way, and promises herself that she will not scream.

 

(She does anyway, the long tortured scream of twisted metal pushed past its tensile point. It lingers in the dust-filled air for a long time afterward, echoing from the peaks of rubble mountains—from the depths of dirty, pockmarked hollows—from the shattered glass of windows and the broken wood of doors—from the hushed and empty spaces where warming walls used to be.

 

Across the street, the boy-turned-man bows his head to avoid seeing the debris-strewn lot across the road. He can hear the echo, and he stares down at the sidewalk, at the small tear splotches staining the ground between his feet.

 

The construction workers, however, pay the echo no mind, peering up their machines and beginning to haul away the rubble tike a corpse to the graveyard. To them, it is no matter. A new rink will be built. Or maybe someone will buy the land and raise an office or some houses where the old rink had been razed. Perhaps it will sit unused for a while, an empty lot, a forgotten land.

 

It is no matter. There is work to be done.)


End file.
